Page 62 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

62
SPOTLIGHT
By Jana F. Brown
Louina, a 28-year-old expectant mother
who lacked prenatal care, traveled more
than 50 miles through rural Haiti, from
Jacmel to Port-au-Prince, in search
of medical care and, ultimately, peace
of mind.
“I came three hours to visit this clinic,”
she told the staff at the mobile health
facility in Haiti’s capital city. “I know
people who have come here before and
they said it’s the best care if you are
pregnant. My husband and I had been
so worried because I had not felt the
baby move that often, so I wanted to
get an ultrasound and see a good doctor.
I couldn’t wait to show my husband the
pictures of our healthy baby.”
Three years later, one patient’s grate-
ful refrain is a familiar one at the mo-
bile clinics serving Haiti’s impoverished
population, most of whom would not
otherwise have regular access to health-
care. The structure itself is a fine example
of ingenuity, two recycled shipping con-
tainers (more than 40 million of them
sail through U.S, ports annually), each
measuring 8 ’ x 20’ , provided and sus-
tained by Containers 2 Clinics, an
American organization founded in 2008.
Jessica Thompson Somol ’88, the organ-
ization’s executive director, explains
that the facility works in part because
it is staffed and operated by locals, who
have been empowered with ownership
of its mission.
The Port-au-Prince location is C2C’s
flagship clinic, sent in response to Haiti’s
catastrophic earthquake in 2010. This
clinic was followed by a unit near Swak-
opmund, Namibia, in 2011 and then
another in August 2013 at Camp Coq,
in Haiti’s rural northern region. There
C2C unveiled its first fee-for-service
clinic, where basic healthcare needs and
treatment for common ailments are
available at an average cost of $10 to
Jessica Thompson Somol ’88: Mak
$12 per visit. The fee, says Somol, is
competitive with what Haitians pay for
care at larger, more distant facilities. How-
ever, due to C2C’s flexible infrastructure,
its clinics offer greater convenience for a
population that often does not have easy
access to transportation.
“There is a demand for this kind of
service on the local level,” says Somol.
“Haiti has nonprofit organizations that
operate with similar missions of provid-
ing health care to the poor. But we’d like
to shake the perception that there is no
room for private enterprise in serving
poor communities with primary care.
Our patients pay a low fee for services
and we are leveraging private enter-
prise so that we can roll out more clinics
sooner to meet the demand for services.”
The Wharton-educated Somol studied
as a Harvard undergraduate with Paul
Farmer, a pioneer in community-based
healthcare strategies. She met C2C founder
Elizabeth Sheehan through their children,